'This Week' Transcript: Rep. Paul Ryan

MILLER: It's because great powers are allowed and do behave
hypocritically and inconsistently. And the reality is, Libya was
easy. It was vulnerable. No serious air defense system. No serious
allies. We could get away with and did military intervention.
Syria's quite different.

And, number two, you don't have a fundamentally divided country.
You don't have Syrias right now. You have repression. And you have
Bashar Assad mobilizing the instruments of power in order to stay in
power. I think the arc on the Assads over time is a negative one, and
I think they're an old story, but it's going to take a long time for
this movie to play out.

AMANPOUR: The movie is being very closely watched by many people
in the United States and around the world. People are always coming
up to me and asking me, what does this all mean for us, what happened
in Tunisia, what happened in Egypt?

People thought Egypt was a democratic revolution, which
presumably it still has an opportunity to be, but the latest Pew polls
give some worrying figures for the United States, basically saying
about Egypt that 52 percent of Egyptians now disapprove of how
President Obama is dealing with the calls for political change in
their own nation, Egypt, elsewhere, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Libya. And
then their view of the United States, 79 percent unfavorable, 20
percent favorable. Vali, how can this be? People hoped that a
democratic Middle East would actually have a better view of the United
States.

NASR: Well, first of all, we're not at a democracy in the Middle
East. All that we've achieved is that in Tunisia and Egypt, which
were the easy cases, the leadership has gone. There's still a long
distance between the old order going and actually arriving at
democracy. And there is also a very short distance in these kinds of
situations between euphoria and disenchantment.

And finally, the fundamental issues that divided the people of
the Middle East from the United States have not gone away. The Middle
East has been busy with other issues recently, but when the dust
settles, the critical issues of the Arab-Israeli peace process, this
whole issue between Islam and the West, Iran, you know, all of these
issues, Al Qaida, are still there. And nothing has happened to close
the gap between our perception of those issues and the people's
perception of those issues in the Muslim world.

AMANPOUR: I'm going to get to the Middle East peace process in
two seconds, but I just want to ask you further, the foreign policy of
Egypt looks like they are going closer to their traditional
adversaries -- let's say Iran, let's say Hamas -- people who are sort
of -- definitely adversaries of the United States, as well. How is
this going to work out? And why is that?

NASR: Well, because for the longest time our foreign policy in
the Middle East was based on the support of the palaces, who really
didn't need to deal with the street and the people in the Middle East.
It's the Mubaraks and Ben Alis and, you know, kings of Saudi Arabia
and Jordan that made decisions that we work with. Now we have to deal
with countries that are reflecting the public opinion of their masses.